Mecklenburg Times: News for Mecklenburg, Union and Iredell counties Real Estate, Development, Construction, and Community News in the Charlotte area and throughout Mecklenburg, Union and Iredell counties
Bailes Ridge Business Park
National mortgage lender Movement Mortgage LLC has announced the relocation of its national headquarters to the Bailes Ridge Business Park in Lancaster County, S.C.
Movement Mortgage plans to invest $22 million to build a 104,000-square-foot office building on 24 acres in the business park, and will begin moving employees into the new building from its existing headquarters in Virginia Beach, Va., once it’s completed in the first quarter of 2016.
Construction of the building by Charlotte-based Keith Corp. is expected to begin in the next 30 to 45 days.
The office building will be two stories and be divided by an atrium in the middle, with about 50,000 square feet of space on each side of the atrium. The building and a parking lot with between 500 and 600 spaces are expected to take up about 12 acres of the 24-acre site.
The 300-acre business park sits just south of S.C. Highway 160 in the northern tip of the county’s panhandle, a little more than 4 miles southwest of Ballantyne Corporate Park in Charlotte, where Movement has since 2008 leased 20,000 square feet on the second and third floors of the Hayes Building.
“We looked at a number of existing properties and various tracts of land in the surrounding counties and ultimately felt Bailes Ridge was the best fit and is the place we will call home for many years to come,” said Movement Mortgage CEO and former Carolina Panthers tight end Casey Crawford in a statement.
Movement Mortgage Chief Financial Officer Laura Bowles said the company had also considered leasing space in Mecklenburg County, but that there weren’t many options. She also said South Carolina’s tax incentives were a big draw for the company, which could be eligible to receive up to $53 million in exchange for bringing 650 jobs into the county within the next five years.
About 160 employees will relocate to the Lancaster County building from Ballantyne Corporate Park, according to Bowles. The remaining jobs will be filled by new employees that the company expects to hire within the next five years.
All corporate functions will operate out of the new building, and employees will include those in human resources, accounting, financing, marketing, loan processing and underwriting and compliance and regulation. The average salary of the employees will be $56,000, according to Bowles.
“I think really the most relevant part of the story here is that this is an indication of the type of expectations we have,” Bowles said. “It’s really just a strong statement to the growth and the additional jobs that we’ll be bringing.”
Movement Mortgage started with just four employees in 2008, and has since grown to more than 1,600 employees. The company was recognized as the fastest growing privately held mortgage bank in the country by Inc. Magazine in 2012 and 2013, according to its website.
Crawford said the company is on track to process more than $6 billion in home loans this year.
Cushman & Wakefield|Thalhimer’s Brian Brtalik and Dan Woodley are representing Movement Mortgage in the relocation.
